Documentation

User Guide

Zend Framework 2 uses a module system to organise your main
application-specific code within each module. The Application module provided by
the skeleton is used to provide bootstrapping, error and routing configuration to
the whole application. It is usually used to provide application level
controllers for, say, the home page of an application, but we are not going to
use the default one provided in this tutorial as we want our album list to be
the home page, which will live in our own module.

We are going to put all our code into the Album module which will contain our
controllers, models, forms and views, along with configuration. We’ll also tweak
the Application module as required.

As you can see the Album module has separate directories for the different
types of files we will have. The PHP files that contain classes within the
Album namespace live in the src/Album directory so that we can have
multiple namespaces within our module should we require it. The view directory
also has a sub-folder called album for our module’s view scripts.

In order to load and configure a module, Zend Framework 2 has a
ModuleManager. This will look for Module.php in the root of the module
directory (module/Album) and expect to find a class called Album\Module
within it. That is, the classes within a given module will have the namespace of
the module’s name, which is the directory name of the module.

Create Module.php in the Album module:
Create a file called Module.php under zf2-tutorial/module/Album:

Our getAutoloaderConfig() method returns an array that is compatible with
ZF2’s AutoloaderFactory. We configure it so that we add a class map file to
the ClassMapAutoloader and also add this module’s namespace to the
StandardAutoloader. The standard autoloader requires a namespace and the
path where to find the files for that namespace. It is PSR-0 compliant and so
classes map directly to files as per the PSR-0 rules.

As we are in development, we don’t need to load files via the classmap, so we provide an empty array for the
classmap autoloader. Create a file called autoload_classmap.php under zf2-tutorial/module/Album:

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returnarray();

As this is an empty array, whenever the autoloader looks for a class within the
Album namespace, it will fall back to the to StandardAutoloader for us.

Note

If you are using Composer, you could instead just create an empty
getAutoloaderConfig(){} and add to composer.json:

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"autoload":{"psr-0":{"Album":"module/Album/src/"}},

If you go this way, then you need to run phpcomposer.pharupdate to update
the composer autoloading files.

The config information is passed to the relevant components by the
ServiceManager. We need two initial sections: controllers and
view_manager. The controllers section provides a list of all the controllers
provided by the module. We will need one controller, AlbumController, which
we’ll reference as Album\Controller\Album. The controller key must
be unique across all modules, so we prefix it with our module name.

Within the view_manager section, we add our view directory to the
TemplatePathStack configuration. This will allow it to find the view scripts for
the Album module that are stored in our view/ directory.

We now need to tell the ModuleManager that this new module exists. This is done
in the application’s config/application.config.php file which is provided by the
skeleton application. Update this file so that its modules section contains the
Album module as well, so the file now looks like this: